Thelonious Monk // "I never was a person that thought because some person was doing one thing, and seemed to be making out better, that I should be doing the same thing... I’ve never wished for anybody else’s job. I enjoy what I do and I’m myself all the time. And I’ll continue to be me."
Maurice Sendak // "Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters...I sent him a card and I drew a picture...I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."
Robert Graves // "Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience': They're talking to a single person all the time."
Kurt Vonnegut // "Why me? That’s a very Earthling question to ask...why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Yes. Well here we are...trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
David Attenborough // "We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves."
Susan Sontag // "It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little…have few verbal means. Eloquence…thinking in words…is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech."
Edith Piaf // "I always thought my days spent in darkness as a child gave me a very special sensitivity. Much later, when I really wanted to hear, really 'see' a song, I'd close my eyes. And when I wanted to bring it out of the very depths of myself, out of my guts, out of my belly, when the song had to come from far away, I'd close my eyes."
Ezra Pound // "The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension."
Bill Watterson // "If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I bet they would live a lot differently."
Nina Simone // "I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why."
Henri Matisse // "The artist must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "Before defining art, or any concept, we must answer a far broader question: What's the meaning of man's life on Earth? Maybe we are here to enhance ourselves spiritually. If our life tends to this spiritual enrichment, then art is a means to get there. This, of course, is in accordance with my definition of life. Art should help man in this process. Some say that art helps man to know the world like any other intellectual activity. I don't believe in this possibility of knowing, I am almost an Agnostic. Knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life. The more we know, the less we know: getting deeper, our horizon becomes narrower. Art enriches man's own spiritual capabilities and he can then rise above himself to use what we call 'free will.'"